Harisenbon wrote:By the way, Daichi, It's hard to tell because the image is kind of blurry, but I'm almost positive the Japanese in that image is typed, not hand written.

I specifically searched for an example of handwriting, but when I found this I, like yourself, thought it looked typed. However, after checking closely I'm sure it is handwritten. This person must be very good at it because the characters have a very uniform look.

Look closely at the first word. You should be able to see that the final stroke loops in a slightly different shape in each of the examples.

Harisenbon wrote:By the way, Daichi, It's hard to tell because the image is kind of blurry, but I'm almost positive the Japanese in that image is typed, not hand written.

I specifically searched for an example of handwriting, but when I found this I, like yourself, thought it looked typed. However, after checking closely I'm sure it is handwritten. This person must be very good at it because the characters have a very uniform look.

Look closely at the first word. You should be able to see that the final stroke loops in a slightly different shape in each of the examples.

I ran back across this discussion while looking for a better explanation of why some kana are written differently... and decided to dig into this a bit further. (And yes, I realize that I just blasted an over 6 year old thread to the top of the list.)

I would also bet on it being typed. The text is apparently from Snow Country (雪国 Yukiguni) by the author Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成 Kawabata Yasunari, 14 June 1899 – 16 April 1972).

I'm pretty positive that it's merely an image of a page from that book. It's possible that someone wrote it out as part of some school assignment or something, but I think it highly unlikely. I think the 'differences' we're seeing are nothing more than artifacts of the print process and subsequently very poor resolution scan etc.

I also feel a little skeptical about that little flash video you supplied... it might show the start and end characters for those, but even at that I think they just did a basic "morph" with some program and didn't actually trace the evolution of the characters... so I didn't really play around with it very much.

Yes, it's like the difference between fonts and personal stylistic choices but for that very reason, you should learn to recognize each one so you are not stumped when you read something in a different font, or written by various people. Also, it's very common in calligraphy to join the strokes like that. Another thing is Japanese shorthand. It kills me. Sorry that I don't have an example right now but from my own experience, I have relatives in Japan, once I got a letter and I was so stumped as to a particular kanji. I couldn't find it in a dictionary. It really bothered me. Finally, I showed it to my mom and she explained that's the short version of writing it by hand since to write all the strokes is too much trouble.

So is it the general consensus opinion of this topic that it doesn't matter if one learns to write ki with 3 strokes, or sa with 2, so long as they are still legible? I'm just starting out leaning the kanas and how to write them, so I wanted to clarify this point before getting too far into it to change easily.